In the spring of 1864, a New York medical student joined the Union army and was stationed in Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Over the next 18 months, until July 1865, Richtmyer Hubbell visited Washington regularly and witnessed some of the most compelling events of the Civil War period, yet here he chronicles not the military aspects of the war but the political and social events, and anticipates the impact that those events will have on the war and on the nation. Edited and annotated by historian Marc Newman, the diary records the three occasions in which Hubbell Abraham Lincoln, the Electoral College balloting in the 1864 presidential election, Lincoln's second inauguration, and a New Year's Eve ball at the White House following the war. In the most eloquent entry Hubbell shares his grief and insight on Lincoln's assassination.